If you want to be found in search, you need to make sure your website is “search friendly”. This is a surprisingly hard concept for most people to get a grasp on. But think about it, yes humans will be using your website, but Google will be indexing it. Google is a robot for all intents and purposes so you need to learn how to communicate with it. This is actually a good thing because its less subjective than a human would be. Learn to speak to Google and you’ll have better results getting indexed. More people will find your site. So lets look at how we need to shape our content to tell the mighty search engine what our page is about. This goes for everything on your site – not just the home page. In face, most people will surf into some other page on your site so make sure they all fit this criteria.
Titles and Keywords
Titles on your content weigh in pretty heavy. They need to sum up what the page is about. Its really easy to want to be cute or funny with this, but I’ve found its best to be more conservative and straight forward. Keywords are too easy just to give to a search engine, but think what people would search if they were looking for your page. Use those words in the title and make sure you use them throughout the page.
URL’s
Another reason you need to use a CMS – its important that your websites url contains the keywords and the title. It keeps things clean and makes them index better. Yoursite.com/node/145 is abstract. Get it to write Yoursite.com/article-title/ This is clean and pretty. Search engines like this.
Images
Make sure you use images with your content. We live in a visual culture and Google wants to reward any good content it can find. Make sure your images use “alt” attributes in the html. Use these to describe the image or even reflect the title. For example:
<img src="image.jpg" />
This just tells Google that you have an image. But this:
<img src="image.jpg" alt="flower" />
This tells Google what the image is and can help in how it indexes your content. Its a nice way of relating the image to the actual content on the page.
Links
Links are probably the single most important tag in html. They make the internet the internet. Links give us new pages and new information. They are useful and helpful use them in your content. Google likes to see some external linking to sites of authority. Share information when its relevant. Google notices this. Its the democracy of the internet. You want people to link to you, so link to others.